Posts by DizzyDoo

I remember SmileyHouse! It was a MooClick/MooSock thing, if I recall correctly. Was it a sandbox-type thing? I think it might have been one of the first sandbox games I ever played.

Hello!

A couple of years ago I wrote an MMORPG in Multimedia Fusion 2, making heavy use of the Flash exporter, the Lacewing extension, and pyLacewing on the serverside.

I wrote a couple of articles about the development of the game, and what it was like to release an MMORPG.

• Please login to see this link.
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I'll be about if anyone has any questions those articles don't answer.

I also am after FlashURL. It's weird that all the download links only have the mfx, and not the .dat. All I'm trying to do is open an external URL on newgrounds, but I just can't get it to work, even though it used to.

The Newgrounds extension never worked, at least, I never got any of them to work.

Yes, it's absolutely fine to use Lacewing for commercial games. I am!

The framerate is good, never drops below 59, but I do experience a certain amount of Please login to see this link. that isn't great. Not sure if that's a vsync issue, but it happens for me at the slightest bit of scrolling.

Out of those suggestions, All Guns Blazing is still the best one. Escape from X, Conflict X and Project X, sounds more generic still, and most of your options there I don't immediately know how to pronounce. All Guns Blazing, however, immediately sounds action-packed, and for what you describe as a "fairly generic space shoot 'em up" that might be how you want to entice your players.

Frame size doesn't make any difference to the frame rate, if that's what people are complaining about. What does tend to impact are the forloops, and doing things with large images (scaling, rotating, animating them). Those are the things you need to cut down on.

A better solution would be to use Looki's FlashFX extension. Just drop it into every frame, and on at least the first one have a Start of Frame condition with a FlashFX - Stage - Set scale mode to 'exactFit'. This will scale the game up when you zoom in. There are other scale modes you can experiment with too.

My best guess is that FGL are mainly using Adobe AIR's Please login to see this link.and Please login to see this link. package, and tying it up with their own service to do things like tracking and cross-promotion.

The ability to run swfs as Apps for iOS and Android is already available, though I've no idea how much control the developer needs over the code.

I have also heard from Danny that Hide Layer By Name is also broken in the latest update. Perhaps much of the Layer Object has been broken?

I'm going to go a few months later: 20/11/2014

The issues seem to be with server-sent player left channel and player joined channel messages. So one way to get around the catastrophic crashing errors is to just not use channels in your app. For people who code their own servers with pyLacewing or something else, like me, this isn't a massive problem, since we can use the server to relay a clients messages to other clients ourselves.

Just to help out other Lacewing-Flash developers, I'll spell out the two choices you have: 1) Use channels, but you can only have a maximum of 16 players in a channel. Any one joining or leaving after that will cause every other player's app (or sometimes even browser tab) to crash. 2) Don't use channels, but you'll have to write your own server to relay messages.

I'm using that version with an extra fix or three from Looki. Please login to see this link.

Oooh, but I'm now realising that it's a very similar problem to the one Mathias was fixing last time, with numbers being read as much, much higher than they should be. As soon as the number of connections goes past 16, everything crashes, because 2^17 > 65535, the capacity for a short. That would explain the various stack overflows, null values when it comes to player ids, etc.

The Flash version of Lacewing is a bit of a mess. It has a number of issues that cause a Flash swf to completely lock up, which is pretty disastrous. I don't even think the errors are that hard to fix, just involving a check for a null value every now and then.

The following errors are the ones that pop up when I'm running in the debug version of Flash, and only when I've got somewhere around 18 or so connections.

This is the most common one:

TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference. 
    at lacewing::Client/handleMessage()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/onSocketReceive()

Occasionally I also get these:

Error: Error #2030: End of file was encountered.
    at flash.utils::ByteArray/readBytes()
    at lacewing::Client/readBinary()
    at lacewing::Client/handleMessage()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/onSocketReceive()

TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.
    at lacewing::Client/getPeer()
    at lacewing::Client/handleMessage()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/process()
    at lacewing::Client/onSocketReceive()

I'm not sure what kind of ritual one must perform to get a fix for Lacewing, but Mathias and Looki (who aren't even the authors!) have patched the flipping thing before, so I'm posting this here with the hope that my last few months of work haven't been completely wasted.

Looks like a real arcade site! You'll be sponsoring games in no time.

I can't say I agree with you Ryan, I loved the game. Actually, it's one of those designs I wish I had thought of. "A twin-stick shooter... except turn-based." It's really good fun.

Nifflas, Jacob, you guys should do something with this prototype.

The GET object is what you're looking for, it's ported to Flash.

Fixed. Spreading values and then immediately calling a loop that'll use those values doesn't really work. The loop triggers before the values are spread. I just moved the loop call to a different line.

I also cleaned up the last event's actions, much easier to understand. Hope that helps.

Konidias makes some good points. There are games heavily focused around stats that are a joy to play, and others where it is just grinding. The differentiator there is how those stats improve, is there meaty gameplay behind it. Could the game stand without the stats? If it's just clicking a button and it says "Well done, you picked a crop!" or "Well done, you've increased your X attribute!" then I'm sceptical that people will play and even more so that people will link it to their friends. I'd rather a game have a little bit of content and be fun to play than to have a game give me hundreds of options, all of which are a bore.

I can definitely see why you are against microtransactions, in the social game genre they are usually done terribly. Whole game designs are architectured to exploit people for money, and they're usually devoid of any real gameplay.

I notice that your video doesn't show a prototype, so when I hear 'social game' and 'farming sim' I'm sure it's understandable why I immediately think of 'farmville'. But you mentioned Harvest Moon, and if you were to show a game that is like that, and also slightly multiplayer, gosh, I think lots of people would be interested. Farmville and Harvest Moon are two very different games.

It's hard to suggest how your project would be monetised without seeing exactly what kind of game it is. Ads are pretty okay, I would personally tend towards CPMStar which, for me, has been roughly 70 times better than Mochi, but maybe some kind of 'Premium' level account where users can pay a couple dollars and go ad free, maybe with some extra functionality like an extended friends list. Then again, for a social game, you wouldn't want to lock down the friends list...

It's a tricky one. I'm working on a Please login to see this link., it's Flash, built with MMF2 and multiplayer (real-time, in my case), and I've got plans to monetise it which are a mix of ads (for the free players), extra content/dungeons/expansions for ~$10, and microtransactions for non-game-effecting vanity items like cool looking costumes. I think that microtransactions that don't give players an advantage of others are fine, if a player wants to spend $1 on a panda costume, sure!